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Desperate Shores — The World That Sent Them · American Political History

0:01
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season one of American Political History Desperate Shores The World That Sent Them Before we get to Roanoke, before we get to Jamestown, before any English ship sails west with settlers and hope and catastrophically bad planning, we need to understand the world that sent them.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: Because those ships didn't sail out of nowhere.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: They sailed out of a specific moment in history, a moment of war, of religious upheaval, of printing presses and plagues and kingdoms colliding with each other across a continent.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: A moment when Europe was being remade, and no one knew what it was going to become.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't understand that world, you can't understand why those ships left, who was on them, and what they were really looking for when they arrived.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: So let's set the stage.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: The first thing you have to understand about Europe in the fifteen hundreds is that Europe didn't really exist.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: I know that sounds strange, bear with me.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: When we say Europe today, we mean a defined set of nation states France, Spain, England, Germany, stable borders, shared governments, national identities, two hundred odd countries on a map.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: That world did not yet exist.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: In 1500, what we casually call Europe was a fabric of roughly five hundred separate kingdoms.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: A hundred years later, consolidation wars had reduced that to around 300.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: But the point stands.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: No one in 1550 thought of themselves as European, they were Castilian, Aragonese, Flemish, Neapolitan.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: To give you a sense of what this actually looked like, the man we call the King of Spain in 1600 was not the ruler of a single nation.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: He was simultaneously the King of Castile, King of Aragorn, King of Naples, King of Sicily, King of Sardinia, and ruler of the Flanders, the Duke of Mulan, and the Lord of the Dutch lowlands.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: And that's before you get to the Americas, where he held the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, covering what we now know as South America, Central America, Mexico, and the American Southwest.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: One man, one throne.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: That concept, a nation, a people, a shared contract between a government and its citizens, that idea doesn't fully arrive in the world until the United States Constitution.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: And we will get there eventually down the road.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: But in fifteen fifty, the political world is kingdoms and families and dynasties and conquest, and over it all, holding it together is the Catholic Church.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: In the Europe of the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church was the only institution with the wealth and the structure to keep knowledge alive.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you what I mean by this.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Does your family have an old recipe?
3:06
SPEAKER_00: That really good one, that one your great grandmother made that no one else knows how to replicate.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Have any of them been lost because no one wrote them down?
3:16
SPEAKER_00: That's literacy.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: The transportation of individual knowledge down through time.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: It sounds ordinary.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: It's extraordinary.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: In the Dark Ages, there were perhaps only a few thousand books in all of Europe, each one worth roughly the price of a house today.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: The Catholic Church was the only institution with enough wealth and stability to employ people who weren't doing physical labor, people who could spend their lives reading, writing, preserving knowledge.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Without the Catholic Church, even more of the ancient history would have simply vanished.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: And then came the printing press in 1440, Gutenberg.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly the Bible could be produced cheaply enough that an ordinary gentleman could own one and read it for himself, without a priest to interpret it.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: This changes everything, because the Protestant Reformation, which starts formally in 1579 when Martin Luther nails his ninety five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, is a direct consequence of mass literacy.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: People read the Bible for themselves and start asking questions the Catholic Church couldn't easily answer.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther argued that the grace of God came through faith alone, not through the rituals and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: He quoted Romans three, twenty three through twenty four.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by the grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: This was, to the Catholic Church, nothing short of a revolution.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: The priesthood of all believers, every baptized Christian equal in God's eyes, no hierarchy required, no pope, no intermediary between the man and his maker.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: If that is true, what were kings for?
5:04
SPEAKER_00: Because the divine right of kings, the idea that monarchs ruled by God's sanction, rested entirely on the Catholic Church's authority.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Catholic kings and Protestant kings fought for two centuries over the direction of Christianity.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just theology, it was power, it was survival, and it produced savage violence for generations.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: On Saint Bartholomew's day in 1572, the French king ordered the assassination of Protestant Huguenot leaders who had come to Paris for a royal wedding.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: His men killed them openly in a tavern.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: What followed was a mob violence that spread through the streets of Paris, then into the countryside.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: The river Seine ran red with blood, bodies washed ashore for weeks downstream.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: Estimates put the dead at somewhere between ten and twenty thousand, Frenchmen killed by their own countrymen, in matter of days for the crime of reading the Bible differently.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: That is the world the colonists come from.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, into the world of cracked kingdoms and religious warfare, something arrives that changed the calculation entirely.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: In fourteen ninety two, Columbus sails west under the Spanish crown.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Within a generation, Spanish conquistadors have conquered the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, and were extracting wealth from the Americas on a scale that no European power had ever imagined possible.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: Gold, silver, more wealth than Europe produced in a single generation shipped back across the Atlantic in steady, staggering streams throughout the sixteenth century.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: To the understand what that wealth meant, Spain used it to field the largest army in Europe, fight off the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, suppress Protestant rebellions in the Netherlands, and build the most powerful naval fleet in the world had yet seen.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: Spain didn't just get rich.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Spain became the engine that ran European politics, and naturally, every other European power wanted what Spain had.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: But the Pope had already settled the question for who owned the New World.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: In 1493, one year after Columbus' return, Pope Alexander VI issued what became known as the Inter Setera Decree.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: The New World would be divided.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: Spain takes the West, Portugal takes the East.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: England, France, and the Dutch get nothing.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: The Papal Decree was, of course, only binding if you accepted the Pope's authority to divide the world.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: England had some thoughts about that.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: But it also meant something practical and dangerous.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Spain had standing orders to destroy any non-Spanish settlement found in the Americas.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Any English ship that tried to plant a colony in the New World was sailing into territory Spain considered divinely mandated to be theirs.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: The Spanish wouldn't just complain about it, they would send warships and soldiers.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: So England faced a problem.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: It wanted what Spain had.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: It could not take it directly with confrontation.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Spain was simply too powerful, and it could not plant colonies in the New World without risking those colonies being wiped out by the most powerful military on earth.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Something had to change.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: That something was a storm and a queen.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: Queen Elizabeth I of England had a problem beyond Spain.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: In 1570, Pope Pius V had excommunicated her, declared her a heretic, released her subjects from their duty of obedience, and essentially issued a papal sanction for assassination and overthrow.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Their logic was simple remove the binding of God between the English people and their monarch, and the English Catholics would rise up against her.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: The paradigm of divine right had worked for centuries.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: People obeyed the kings because God commanded it, take away God's blessing, and the throne would collapse.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: He was wrong.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: Queen Elizabeth used the excommunication to build something new.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: If the Pope had cut England loose from Catholic obedience, then English loyalty would have to be to something else.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: England itself, to the concept of the Englishman.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: And she made investments in pirates, privateer fleets that raided Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean, bleeding Spanish wealth and keeping her own treasury alive.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: She also invested in naval technology.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: When Spain finally assembled its great fleet, the Armada, to end the question once and for all in 1588, Elizabeth recalled every ship of the realm.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: One of the men she most trusted in the fight was Francis Drake, a Devon sailor's son who had spent a decade raiding Spanish ports and treasure ships across the Caribbean and the Pacific.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: The Spanish had begun calling him El Drake.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: They had a standing warrant for his arrest.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: He was, depending on which side of the channel you stood on, either a pirate or a hero.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: And Elizabeth, practically speaking, needed him to be both.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Spain's plan was straightforward.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Their armada would sail from Spain to Flanders, pick up a large Spanish army stationed there, escort it across the channel, land it in England, march on London, and restore Catholic rule.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: The war would be over quickly.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Except the Armada never made it to Flanders.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: The English fleet harried the Spanish ships up the channel, smaller, faster, staying at range, refusing the close engagements the Spanish fleet needed.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Then a fireship attack at Gravesline broke the Spanish formation, then a gale, then another storm.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: When it was all over, England had sunk or destroyed roughly a third of the Spanish fleet in combat.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Another third ran aground while it was trying to escape around the northern end of Scotland and past Ireland.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: Of the hundred and thirty ships that sailed, around sixty made it back to Spain.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: England, the scrappy Protestant upstart on the edge of the European world, had survived, and more than survived.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: It was emerging as a major naval power.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Spain, though still powerful, could no longer dominate the Atlantic unchallenged.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: English ships would sail west, English colonies could be planted, and Spain would be, for the first time, too stretched to destroy them all.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: The window for England and America had opened.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: But understanding why England wanted colonies isn't just about Spain and naval power.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: You have to understand what was happening inside of England.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: England in sixteen hundred had a land problem.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: All of it was taken.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: Every acre of productive farmland was already in the hands of noble families.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: There was no path upward, no frontier, no fresh start, for thousands of younger sons of gentry who would inherit nothing, for the tenants who farmed land they would never own, for the skilled craftsmen now flooding into English cities that couldn't absorb them.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: London was perhaps a city of two hundred thousand people, more than double what it had been fifteen years before, and the streets showed it, poverty, vagrancy, crime.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: The government was genuinely worried about social stability.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: The Americas looked from England like a pressure valve.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: And Spain had proven the theory.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: Spain's colonies weren't just politically powerful, they were commercially extraordinary.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: The question England merchants and courtiers in the court were asking in the fifteen eighties wasn't whether to colonize the New World.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: It was how to.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: The answer they arrived at was the charter, a legal instrument, a political tool of the age.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: A charter was a grant from the crown giving an individual or company the legal monopoly over a defined geographic area for a set period of time.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: In exchange for that monopoly, the charter holder agreed to actually go plant a colony, at their own expense, and deliver a share of the profits back to the crown.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: Which meant the crown got colonies without paying for them, the investors got monopoly rights, and the prospect of enormous returns, and the settlers got passage.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: The math for a potential investor looked appealing on paper.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: One hundred pounds invested today in exchange for one hundred or one thousand and acres of good farmland, or an exclusive right to the fur trade in the region, or a cut of the sassafras harvest, which in the fifteen eighties was believed to be a cure all medical wonder worth extraordinary prices in European markets.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: The math for the settler was different.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: Most of them couldn't pay their own passage, so they signed indentureships, contracts that bound them to work for a company or a landowner for a set term, usually seven years in exchange for their voyage and a small land grant at the end.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Seven years of your labor in a land you've never seen, working for a man who controls everything about your life in exchange for ten acres at the end.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: That's the deal that filled those first ships.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: And it tells you something about what was waiting for those people in England, that so many of them took it.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share the show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.